Modern networks continue to provide electronic devices the ability to communicate with other devices. The continuing growth of networking systems and technology seems limitless and the speed of networked communications has brought benefits to nearly every human endeavor. Local Area Networking (LAN), particularly, is evolving rapidly into wireless connectivity and bringing another level of performance and convenience to the home and business networking environment.
Networks, even if relatively small, can consist of enormous numbers of devices. The complexity of networks continues to expand as does the application of network concepts to more and more disciplines and environments. With the growing market for wireless data networks, there is considerable interest in integrating the support of new services such as wireless voice telephony, MP3 and other demanding protocols.
In wireless data networking, whether implemented by RF or infrared technology, data are transmitted over channels in data frames. The rate of frame transmission varies with volume of transmissions throughout the network. The quality of a channel, which is analogous to the rate at which a channel is able to carry data frames error free, varies over time due to burst errors or changes in the operating environment. At times, usually the times of highest demand, channel quality can cause channel efficiency to be very low. This time-varying channel quality, and thus channel efficiency, is not addressed in wireless network standards such as the current IEEE 802.11 specifications. Many Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements are thus very difficult to achieve. Note that IEEE 802.11 is the emerging standard for wireless network data communications.
In wireless networking, the frame size and bit-error rate (BER) affect the channel efficiency. There is an optimum frame size which depends on the channel quality. When the channel quality is good, the frame size can be larger, and when channel quality is bad, large frame size will cause very high frame-error-rate (FER). However, if the frame size selected is too small, the channel efficiency will be lowered because of the fixed overhead in the header of the frame. In current wireless and mobile networks, there is no method for adjusting the frame size dynamically in order to maintain any specified channel efficiency. Since the channel quality is time-varying due to multipath fading, path loss, and other factors, the prevalent static frame size schemes result in the loss of overall system performance.
What is needed, then, is a method for dynamically varying the data frame size in an operating network. Such a method must adjust frame size to the optimum size based on predictions of optimum frame size in a noisy wireless network environment.